Perhaps most worrying of all is the unwillingness of Obama and other Western leaders to say or do anything to support the hundreds of thousands of Muslim Ethiopians who have been demonstrating peacefully against government interference in their religious affairs for more than a year. (The Ethiopian government claims the country has a Christian majority, but Muslims may account for up to one half of the population.) You’d think a nonviolent Islamic movement would be just the kind of thing the Obama administration would want to showcase to the world. It has no hint of terrorist influence, and its leaders are calling for a secular government under the slogan “We have a cause worth dying for, but not worth killing for.” Indeed, the Ethiopian protesters may be leading Africa’s most promising and important nonviolent human rights campaign since the anti-apartheid struggle.

The demonstrations started in late 2011, after the government began forcing Imams to adopt an imported version of Islam. The Ethiopian government has a long history of trying to control civil society groups, including religious orders, by taking over their leadership. In 1992, Meles replaced the Patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Christian Church with a party insider. Many Christians still resent this. In 1995, he replaced the leader of the Ethiopian Islamic Affairs Supreme Council, also known as the “Majlis,” again with someone from his party. Muslims grumbled about this, but did little more.

Then in 2011, on the pretext that the Islamic community was being radicalized by fundamentalist groups, Meles invited a Lebanese Islamic sect known as “Ahbash” to Ethiopia. The group, which was founded in Beirut by an Ethiopian exile in 1983, preaches obedience to government and opposes politicization of religion. All of Ethiopia’s Imams were required to go to meetings to listen to these newcomers, and were threatened with imprisonment if they refused. In the meetings, government officials were invariably present, and would lecture the imams about “Revolutionary Democracy,” the ruling party’s particularly rigid political doctrine. Most Ethiopian imams are volunteers, who work mainly as farmers, teachers, or in other trades to support themselves. But those who resisted taking part in the meetings and refused to preach the “Ahbash” version of Islam soon found themselves replaced by government-appointed, salaried adherents of the new official religion. The imams and their defenders began organizing nonviolent demonstrations that have since spread across the country.

Ethiopian Muslims and Christians have long coexisted more or less in peace, as they do in Tanzania, Uganda, and other countries in the region. But since the demonstrations started, government officials have tried to infiltrate them and provoke violence among Muslim groups and between Muslims and Christians. It hasn’t worked. In recent months, Christians and secular human rights defenders have even joined in support of the Muslims, and the demonstrations have grown. The demonstrators use Facebook and secure Internet sites to outsmart government censors, and warn people to stay home when they learn that the government intends to plant violent hecklers among them to discredit the movement. When the movement’s leader, Abubakar Ahmed, who had been detained with other protesters (he is one of the twenty-nine awaiting trial), was paraded in chains before TV cameras, protesters showed up at the next demonstration with his picture on their T-shirts, and stood in a phalanx before the police with their wrists crossed, as if they too were in chains.